The motor building industry has maintained the traditional craft for half a century. Accordingly, making form wound armature coils was a labor-intensive operation. Lengths of insulated copper wire were formed to an approximate coil shape on crude manually run machines and then hammered into the final desired shape. One disadvantage of that process was that repeatedly hammering the lengths of wire resulted in some degradation of the properties of the copper wire and in turn the insulation on the wires. Another disadvantage was that it took as long as 15 minutes to shape the lengths of wire into the prescribed shape of the armature coil. Furthermore, it was difficult to produce armature coils within close tolerances, and poorly shaped coils were difficult to insert into the armature and often caused damage which resulted in future motor failures.
Attempts have been made to construct apparatus to shape copper wire in desired coil configurations in a controlled and automated fashion. However, no such apparatus has heretofore been available, much less one that advantageously first assembles the individual wires into a single wire pack and then forms the pack into the desired armature coil configuration. Rather, assembly lines of the related art have been limited to the batch-style methods of forming individual strands and pairs, followed by the assembly of these individual components into a coil.
A semi-automated method for forming armature coils is disclosed herein. Each of the armature coils comprises a plurality of transposed wire pairs. The method for forming the armature coils includes joining a plurality of pairs of wires having offset segments along their lengths, wherein each pair of wires are in contiguous, surface-to-surface engagement with each other along a length defining said each pair of wires, insulating each of the transposed pairs of wires, assembling the plurality of the insulated transposed pairs of wires with the transpositions being staggered to create a pack, and forming the pack into an armature coil in an automated coil forming machine by bending the pack in two planes. The joining of the plurality of pairs of wires having the offset segments along their lengths is effectuated at a transposition point. Each pair of wires has a transposition at a unique point relative to others of the plurality of the pairs of wires forming the coils.